Concerning an recent issue of global warming, every country has been requested to reduce the emission of carbon dioxide (CO2) which has a high global warming potential according to the Kyoto protocol. In view of the environmental maintenance under the balance of international cooperation and competition, many Japanese enterprises have tried to find solutions to reduce energy consumption and the emission of materials of high global warming potentials in the long term. Specifically, semiconductor factories are continuously in operation for twenty-four hours, and a great quantity of energy, such as gas or electric power, is continuously used during the operation. Therefore, semiconductor manufacturers have made various attempts to effectively use the energy by recycling thermal energy generated in the factories to other energy. As one of the attempts, a vapor absorption chiller is operated in a factory. There is being constructed a system in which a turbo chiller, an LPG absorption chiller and a kerosene absorption chiller are properly operated while using the vapor absorption chiller as basic chilling means, so that exhaust heat is collected to be used as a heat source for air conditioning in the factory. In this manner, the clean room is maintained, and the whole semiconductor factory is operated with high efficiency.
In order to reduce energy consumption not only in the whole factory but also in semiconductor manufacturing equipment in the factory, there are presented apparatuses and methods for controlling the apparatuses for energy saving (see, e.g., Patent Document 1).
In Patent Document 1, a normal mode and an energy saving mode are provided as modes for controlling a plurality of units installed in a substrate processing apparatus. If the energy saving mode is selected, only minimum necessary units are operated to perform a process of a substrate to be processed. Then, if there is a need to increase the efficiency of the process, the substrate is processed by operating additional unit(s). Further, during a standby period, only minimum necessary units are operated while other units are stopped, or the whole units are stopped. Thus, when processing a substrate to be processed, the energy consumed in the substrate processing apparatus can be reduced while maintaining the throughput to a certain extent.
(Patent Document 1) Japanese Patent Publication Application No. 2004-200485
However, the aforementioned technology is presented to save energy in equipments (for example, an atmospheric substrate processing apparatus) in which the condition in a processing chamber thereof is restored instantaneously when the units are restarted. Thus, the aforementioned technology does not involve controlling a substrate processing apparatus (for example, a vacuum substrate processing apparatus) in which a nonnegligible time is required for returning from the energy saving mode to the normal mode. Therefore, in the conventional technology for controlling only the stoppage and restart of each unit, it is impossible to accurately control the condition in the processing chamber while the energy saving mode is being returned to the normal mode.
In reality, in order to process the substrate with a high accuracy, it is very important to control the condition in the processing chamber so as to be stably maintained while the energy saving mode is being returned to the normal mode. Herein, it is necessary to properly manage data accumulated from the past and timings for each of the controls for saving energy and controlling the condition in the processing chamber at proper timings.